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Khagani (real name, Afzaladdin Ibrahim-ibn Ali Nadjar), a great Azerbaijanian poet and thinker, a master of panegyric qasida was born in the family of a carpenter in Melgem, a village near Shamakhy. Khagani lost his father at an early age and was brought up by his uncle Kafietdin, a doctor and astronomer at the Shirvanshah’s palace, who for seven years till his death acted "both as nurse and tutor" to Khagani.

In his youth Khagani wrote under the pen-name Haqiqi, which means the seeker of truth. After he had been invited to the court of the Shirvanshah’s he assumed the pen-name of Khagani ("regal"). The life of a court poet palled on him, and he "fled from the iron cage where he felt like a bird with a broken wing" and set off a journey about the Middle East. His travels gave him material for his famous poem Tohvat-ul Iraqein (A Gift of the Two Iraqs), which supplies us with a good deal of material for his biography and in which he described his impressions of the Middle East, and also his philosophical gassida The Ruins of Madain. On return home, Khagani broke off with the court of the Shirvanshah’s, and shah Akhsitan gave order for his imprisonment. It was in prison that Khagani wrote one of his most powerful anti-feudal poems called Habsiyye (Prison Poem). Upon release he moved with his family to Tabriz where fate dealt with him one tragic blow after another: first his young son died, then his daughter and then wife. Khagani was left all alone, and he too died in Tabriz. He was buried at the Poet’s Cemetery in Surbakh, near Tabriz.

Khagani left a remarkable Persian-language heritage which includes some magnificent odes-distiches of as many as three hundred lines with the same rhyme, melodious ghazals, dramatic poems protesting against oppression and glorifying reason and toil, and elegies lamenting the death of his children, his wife and his relatives.

POETRY

1. A Meeting with Jamaladdin of Mosul (excerpts from the poem "Tohvatul-Irakein")
2. The Ruins of Madain
3. A Love Song